Issues for the Next Generation of Criminal Network Investigation Tools

Abstract

Criminal network investigation involves a number of complex knowledge management tasks and both humans and software tools play a central role in performing such tasks. The paper presents issues for future criminal network investigation tools. The research agenda is inspired partly by previous research from the hypertext field on how to build tools to structure, visualize, and manage knowledge and partly from previous research from the intelligence and security informatics field on tool support for criminal network investigation. Crime Fighter is used as an example to explore the limitations of current criminal network investigation tools and to propose issues that needs to be addressed by future tools.